This wedding story is for anyone getting married in this season of weddings. It begins 25 years ago. Two teenagers, Kirsten Opdyke and Tim O’Connell, were at a high-school basketball game. They didn’t know each other, but she’d noticed him in the halls of their New Hampshire high school. Tim, from Vermont, was the new kid in Peterborough. He was tall, good-looking, a hockey player. Kirsten was the pretty girl from a little town a few miles away, a soccer player. Tim was sitting on the bleachers when Kirsten came into the gym. Tim took one look and said to himself, She’s the one. Then Kirsten came over to him, put her hand on his knee, and said, “Who are you?”

“He just sort of stammered,” she remembers today. “He didn’t know what to say.”

“I was just sitting there and this girl puts her hand on my knee,” Tim recalls. “She had this amazing energy. Then she walked off. I don’t even remember the basketball game. I was 17, trying to be cool. But all I thought was, Who is that?”

For the next few weeks Kirsten found a way to walk by Tim’s locker or be nearby while he was on his way to a class. “I thought, He’s the one. I just knew it.”

Their first kiss was at a party, November 25, 1984, a date that Kirsten recalls years later without hesitation. “From that moment on we were inseparable,” she says. Tim lived on an old farmstead. He and Kirsten went three-wheeling, horseback riding, swimming in the lake; they cooked out. Small-town kids talking about a future. “We made a 10-year plan,” Kirsten says. “Graduate high school, college, get married, have four kids.”

Kirsten loved Tim, but after high school he wanted to stick around and work. He wasn’t the studious type back then, and Kirsten wanted to see “new things.” She went off to the University of Kentucky. “We sat in the car just crying our heads off,” she recalls. They phoned nearly every day; then summer came and they worked in town, and after work there was the lake and the warm country nights.

The next summer they found jobs on Cape Cod and shared a cabin with a friend. And then, of course, our story takes a turn, because they were, after all, still so young. It had been three years since high school, and the disappointments crept in. By Kirsten’s senior year, they were just about done. “We were doing this,” she says, as she makes a motion with her hands, one going east, the other west.

After graduating, Tim studied architecture in Boston but spent a lot of time partying. “I was immature,” he says. “There weren’t many parties I missed.” Kirsten had moved to Connecticut as a sales manager for People magazine, her life in a totally different place from Tim’s. One day in 1994, 10 years after they’d met, “Tim called me up,” she says. “He wanted to see how I was doing. We agreed to meet in Boston. I thought, This is it. I knew what I was going to say.

“That whole night sitting across from him, I just wanted to say, ‘I love you, I always have, I always will.’ But I kept getting weird vibes from him. I knew he must be seeing someone else. So I never said it. I bawled my eyes out all the way home. I knew we were meant to be together. I knew that before I died I would see him again.”

Tim remembers that night, too. “I was seeing somebody else, but Kirsten didn’t know,” he says. “I felt sad. I was just in a different place.” So as life shifted around them, they found other mates; Kirsten married in her hometown church in 1995. “On my wedding day I stood in front of the mirror,” she says. “I clenched my hands and squeezed my eyes together. I hoped God would hear me. ‘Please,’ I prayed, ‘have Tim show up.’ He never did.” Tim learned of the wedding, and a year later he married, too: “I thought, How’d we let this happen? We always had this plan that one day we’d be together, and now this.”

Kirsten lived in Granby, Connecticut, keeping a secret box stuffed with every photo, every note, every letter from Tim hidden in her attic–not knowing that Tim had a box, too, filled with her pictures and letters, not knowing that he knew where she was living or that for years every time he drove through Connecticut he hoped somehow he’d see her walking by. She says simply of those years, “Not a day went by that I didn’t think about Tim and have regret. To live with regret is heavy. It’s hard.”

By 2003 Kirsten and her husband, John, had a son and a baby daughter. Despite living in what she calls “the perfect house in a wonderful neighborhood,” the marriage had been strained for some time. One evening while washing dishes, her husband told Kirsten that he was leaving. He was gone in the morning.

Kirsten moved back to New Hampshire with her children. She signed onto a Web site that connects former classmates, writing, “My husband left me for a blonde. Now living in Dublin.” A “message in a bottle” for Tim, she says. But the years passed, and the bottle, it seemed, was never found.

Tim and his wife also had a daughter, and their marriage was also on the rocks. “We were both very unhappy,” he remembers. In 2007, they separated and started on the path to divorce.

5 Responses to A Wedding Story | Here in New England

I’m sorry to be a ‘damper’, but what a sad example of the disposable marriage of our day. This is being made out as a romantic story, yet it is in reality a story of 2 broken marriages and multiple children from 2 broken homes. Marriage is not always going to be happy, nor is our spouse always going to meet all of our needs, but it still intended to be til death do us part. Especially if there are children, it is our duty to work out our selfish issues for the sake of those children.

I completely disagree! Studies show that couples who stay together for the sake of their children are doing them a disservice. Is it better for children to grow up with parents who hate each other and show no signs of love? Or is is better for children to grow up seeing two people who love each other, setting an example of what real love should be. This is truly a love story and those kids are lucky to have two loving parents in the home who give love and show love.
I loved the romantic story of Tim and Kirsten!! Bravo Mel!!

Who knows how the choices we make will turn out? Yes, broken marriages and ended relationships are always sad…but it’s not like either of these two broke up happy homes to be together – it’s more like they re-found each other amidst heartbreak and chaos, which I think is a wonderful thing.

It’s funny. My reaction to this story was to cry! I enjoyed reading about the unusual circumstances of this wedding. I have to comment to say that the article was quite well-written and sparked real tears in my eyes. (And I don’t think the the author resorted to pushing my buttons, either.) Although I do agree that marriage is til death to us part, I do not really know the private workings of this marriage from one magazine article. Even in the Catholic faith, there are reasons that a marriage is not deemed sacred and circumstances in which one party does not approach the union with an open heart. I do wish this couple and their families all the best. I can’t help but feel very hopeful for them both. They are in my thoughts and prayers.

Wow, what a story. What a true love story. Warms my heart. I think the message to all that are about to get married in this season of weddings should be to make sure you are with the right person. This is only a story because of a mistake made many years ago, but I am grateful for their mistake, because this is one hell of a story… It sounds like they finally got it right and all involved will benifit from this union. Thank you Mel…you made my day…

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